Published: 11 December 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
LET’S PLAY WORD ASSOCIATION: what three ideas come to mind when you think of Israel? For me, they are community, culture and corruption. I turn to the first two when attempting to reconcile the third.
There are many layers to each of these ideas and by exploring them I am trying build a foundation of knowledge.
Community
Much of my connection to Israel is linked to my identity as a Diaspora Jew, a grandchild of Holocaust survivors and a graduate of a Jewish day school. Israel as an extension of my community is significant in how I understand it emotionally.
I remember choosing my blue and white patterned dress in 2008, when I was in Year 2, for Israel’s 60th birthday, Yom Haatzmaut. I also have many fond memories of Israeli dancing, learning Hebrew and eating Middle Eastern cuisine — all part of my community’s pride for Jewish expression and Zionist values.
Growing up exposed to this warm, celebrated country, my sense of how I envision Israel is filled with hope. Hope in the idea that this homeland is safe, recognised and prospering, for all its inhabitants and visitors.
While my aspiration can be applied universally, I think what my diaspora community ingrained in me was a sense of ownership of Israel. It’s not just a holiday destination, it’s a home for a historically exiled and oppressed people. It’s a land that we feel a duty to invest in and engage with — emotionally and intellectually.
Culture
Perhaps because of my connection to community, I’m fascinated by the social elements that characterise Israel, particularly Israeli music, dance, academia and language. This developed from my experiences on Shnat, during which I lived and studied in Israel for six months of 2019.
I studied music and culture at Hebrew University, and began to understand how pivotal moments in Israeli history were often symbolised, or broadly enhanced, by music. We learned how the song Jerusalem of Gold built morale during the Six Day War, and how in the 1970s the government restricted the playing of Arabic pop music, Muzika Mizrahit, on radio because it was not considered authentic Israeli music and to maintain Ashkenazi cultural and political supremacy.
Among other reasons, this led me to learning Arabic, as I began to understand that the language is as culturally, emotionally and historically charged as Hebrew, a tongue I had more or less grown up with.
Exploring what it means to be Israeli — to have no public transport on Shabbat, huge street parties on Purim, and three languages on street signs — only heightened my curiosity and joy in feeling that at least some of this culture was my own.
Corruption
Judaism and the belief in a safe homeland for the Jewish people are the foundations of my advocacy for Israel. But this is a continual struggle because it stands alongside my advocacy for a more just world – in Australia, Israel and everywhere else.
These values appear to be out of alignment with much of Israel in its current political and structural form.
My awareness of Israel as a land of much injustice and misrepresentation is relatively new. I knew something of the Occupation in high school but could only begin to understand its implications when I was driven through the concrete maze in the West Bank.
Last year, I was shocked to discover Ben Gurion’s post-1948 policy of settlement towns in the desert where Mizrachi (Middle Eastern Jews) were unknowingly planted, while Ashkenazi migrants were taken to their preferred city locations like Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
I also learned about the oppression and government-planned alienation of Arabic, such as with 1970s pop music, continuing today in the nation-state law. Treatment of language perhaps functions as an extension of the many issues in Israel’s democratic structures.
Being exposed to these flaws has been enlightening as they challenge my childhood perception of a happy and, for the most part, peaceful and prosperous place for everyone who lives there.
But these revelations have not discouraged me. Rather, they have helped me feel ownership and responsibility over a vision for a just and safe land that has never, and perhaps can never, be fulfilled.
Yet by reckoning with what I see as failures of the State, I can create a space to imagine the country I want to return to, and the tangible ways I can help facilitate this change.
My generation is grappling with many world-defining crises —climate change, racism, misogyny and the discrimination faced by many minority groups. These issues are not new and are a problem internationally.
What links me to Israel is not these issues, but a drive to engage with the country’s flaws to continue cultivating the culture and communities, both there and in the diaspora, that we are so privileged to know and be a part of.
Illustration: John Kron
